HCG Backplane Meeting
On 20th and 21st November 2006, the Hypertext Coordination group held a
face-to-face meeting at the CWI in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. It was
hosted by the CWI and the Benelux W3C Office. Representatives of
DI/UBIWeb, HTML, MMI, SVG, SYMM, Voice, WAF, WAI and XForms
attended. Unfortunately Kevin Kelly, representing CDF and co-chair of
the meeting was hospitalised just before the meeting and was unable to
attend; this meant that CDF was not represented. Charles Wiecha of IBM
ably stood in for him at the last moment co-chairing with Steven
Pemberton.
The backplane idea had been initiated by the CDF WG: W3C defines an
extensible syntax mechanism that allows you to combine markup from
different applications, but if those applications are not semantically
compatible, it makes it very hard to effectively combine them.
Following a panel at last year's Technical Plenary, and based on an
initial whitepaper summarising the problems that resulted, the aim of
the meeting was to identify aspects of current W3C applications that
are suitable candidates for coordination, enabling an architecture
that makes it easy to plug new applications in, allowing them to
communicate.
Day 1 consisted mainly of presentations of various aspects; day 2 was
entirely discussions of issues that were raised.
The meeting was a great success! Mind share was very great, and
several groups discovered overlap that they hadn't realised
existed. For instance, five groups are using, or are planning to use, the
XForms model, or something that resembles it very closely. Four groups
discovered that aspects of their eventing model that they thought were
unique to their application were in fact just different expressions of
the same underlying idea.
Six task forces were identified, and initial champions named, to take
the work forward. These were:
Submission: data serialisation, submission, and error-handling.
Model: data and state representation.
Eventing: generating, catching and dealing with events
Intent-based events: separating user actions from particular hardware
bindings
Access: specifying bindings to input methods
Navigation: consistent navigation through compound documents
We were fortunate to have Leigh Klotz of Xerox at the meeting. He is a
superb minuter, and minuted the whole of the second day.
Draft minutes are at:
http://www.w3.org/2006/11/20-backplane-minuteshttp://www.w3.org/2006/11/21-backplane-minutes
Meeting page with links to talks:
http://www.w3.org/2006/11/backplane/
Original whitepaper:
http://www.w3.org/TR/2006/NOTE-backplane-20061116/
Steven Pemberton